When sentimental humans
call their pet 'good dog', they usually mean only that the dog
happens to have done what they wanted him to. We sometimes call
babies 'good' for much the same reason, and not because they ought
to be imitated by anyone who wants to live a good or an admirable
life. Even when we say, 'So-and-so is a good man', we may mean
only that the man is a useful worker, to be praised and cosseted
and used. But we also know that good men and women ('morally' good
men and women) are those who can be counted on to do what they
ought, and for the right reasons. They are courageous and kindly,
loyal, honest, temperate and just. They have good characters and
do what they ought to do because they see they ought.

We usually assume, on the
other hand, that animals let nothing stand in the way of their
desires. Their wants are simple - like the dog with one thought
for each paw (food, food, sex and food) - and anything that
satisfies those wants will do. Whereas human beings do not
willingly eat everything that is strictly edible (or there would
be thriving cockroach farms in every American city), animals will
eat anything that their stomachs can digest and that they can
capture. Whereas human beings seem to love to make difficulties
for themselves in sexual affairs, animals respond to lust as they
would to an itch. This is not to say that animals do not have
preferences, but they do not seem to have taboos. To live 'like an
animal' (especially in the mouths of judges) is to live without
any of the acknowledged restraints of decency, good manners or
respect for persons. This sounds like a good idea to those
romantically inclined to reject civilization, overturn tradition
and begin again as noble savages. It usually sounds like a very
bad idea to the rest of us. Civilization depends upon our not
doing what we immediately and unthinkingly want to do (kill
jay-walking pedestrians, steal books, seduce minors).

Those who disapprove of
the behaviour of animals naturally feel a similar distaste for
alien (presumably savage) human customs. Samuel Johnson, the great
moralist and lexicographer who died two centuries ago, could not
believe that 'savages', illiterate peoples, could have anything to
teach him. According to James Boswell, in his Life of Samuel
Johnson, he declared, 'Pity is not natural to man . . . but
acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. Savages are
always cruel.' 'Natural affection is nothing: but affection from
principle and established duty is sometimes wonderfully strong' —
so savages have no more affection than do hens. Nor do they marry:
'a savage man and a savage woman meet by chance; and when the man
sees another woman that pleases him better, he will leave the
first.' Johnson's determined ignorance is now an embarrassment to
his admirers (including myself). Why could he not have understood
that other human tribes have their own arts and decencies, that
they do not merely act out their momentary whims? He spoke from
within his tradition, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle did when
he declared that the more distant barbarians were beast-like, in
that they lived 'only by perception', without — he supposed —
being able to give principled reasons for their actions and
without any long-term goals.

Every decent moralist is
now conscious that all human tribes have inherited cosmologies and
political systems. We hope, at least, that there are no 'natural
slaves' of the sort Aristotle (unfortunately) taught exploring
Europeans to expect, lacking any moral conscience and acting out
of immediate desire or fear. But Johnson's attitude to animals —
the view that they too are moved only by the prospect of immediate
pleasure - is still widely held. 'Anthropomorphism' is the deadly
sin of supposing that animals have customs, friends, serious
emotions or needs beyond the merely physical. Most commentators
recognize that contempt for 'savages' serves ideological and
commercial interests, giving us an excuse for disrupting the
savages' life, turning them out of their homelands and refusing to
accept that they need to be able to control their own lives in
accordance with their own traditions. That contempt for animals
serves similarly ideological ends is not as widely recognized. To
behave 'like an animal' is to have dropped out, to have abandoned
cultivated manners and an awareness of one's place in the social
universe. To be an animal is to be mere material for the purposes
of human beings, whether those purposes are humane or not.

The older habit, and one
reason why people now disapprove of anthropomorphism, was to
describe animals in entirely human terms. People once believed it
literally true that the lion was king of the beasts, that the
world of wild things and the world of civilized humanity (which is
to say, our kind of human beings) were built according to the same
pattern. All animals were members of the kingdom of animals, as
though difference of species was no more than a difference of
class or profession (and the latter no less than a difference of
species). Animals had their own mysterious language, their own
law. They did what people did: if one animal killed another, he
displayed the same sort of ferocity as would a human warrior. If
one looked after another, it was out of maternal or comradely
compassion. Moralists took examples from the behaviour of animals
even though they also held that animals were really moved by
nothing more than desire or fear. For these moralists, the animals
were not thinking about what would happen to the creatures they
affected and so could not 'really' be compassionate, or soldierly,
or loyal.

The older way of thinking
about animals was clearly confused, and some scholars were led to
attribute far too much human intelligence and moral sensibility to
animals. This led others to try to describe animal behaviour
without committing themselves to any view about what purposes or
perceptions they had. When modern students of animal behaviour say
that an animal is 'aggressive', they mean only that the animal
goes through certain motions that can usually be expected to
result either in a fight or in the withdrawal of the opposing
animal. They do not mean to imply that the animal actively wishes
to hurt its opponent, or even that it knows it has an opponent. If
a stickleback can be made to attack an unrealistic model of a fish
with a red belly, we do not need to think that when it fights a
real male rival it is 'genuinely' angry, in the way that we
sometimes are. When we describe what people are doing we use our
knowledge of their motives to distinguish between different acts:
when Zachary kills Tamar it is not murder unless he really
intended to kill her or hurt her very badly. Orthodox ethologists
have abandoned the attempt to say what animals intend or want, and
the words they use are not supposed to imply anything about the
animals' own feelings. By keeping to what can be measured
and recorded on camera or tape, they hope to avoid the perils of
anthropomorphism.

This approach is a helpful
one when we are dealing with some animals, those that have
relatively few options and those with whom we do not readily
empathize. If woodlice congregate in damp, dark patches, we need
not suppose that they have some idea of what they are looking for,
or an internal map of the territory, or any wish to greet their
friends and neighbours. It is enough that they move faster when it
is dry, and slow down when it is damp. If salmon can find their
way back to the stream where they were born, we need not think
that they know where they are going, nor do we need to imagine
them fighting heroically with the current. They are only swimming
towards a stronger concentration of some chemical in the water. If
hunting wasps construct nests and supply their future progeny with
paralysed caterpillars, it is not because they wish their
offspring well but because they are acting out 'fixed action
patterns', each one released by the successful completion of its
predecessor. If the caterpillar is removed, the wasp will still
seal up the nest and move on to the next one.

But though there are good
reasons not to read too much of our own experience into the
behaviour of animals, and though it is sometimes helpful to
attempt as 'objective' a description as possible of what they do,
the philosophical assumptions behind this programme are very odd.
It is certainly often difficult to know what other people are
feeling and thinking. It even makes sense, of a sort, to wonder
whether the things we call people are perhaps really cleverly
designed robots, whose behaviour is merely physical and who have
no subjective life at all. But anyone who seriously concluded that
this made it reasonable for him to treat people as if they were
indeed nothing but insentient robots would be thought deranged.
There are general difficulties about how we can form reasonable
beliefs about minds other than our own. There are also general
difficulties about how we can be sure that there are real material
bodies: it makes sense to suppose that there are none, that all
our experiences of closed doors and stubborn boulders are merely
mental. Some modern physicists have indeed drawn the conclusion
that electrons and photons and the rest of the particles that
theory demands are fictitious, that the 'laws of physics' really
refer only to the sorts of observation that physicists might make,
not to any real world independent of their observations. It is one
of the ironies of history that life scientists are much more
materialistic than physical scientists. Irony apart, it is at
least very peculiar that students of animal behaviour should think
that merely 'physical' observations (e.g. how fast a thing is
moving) are reliable indicators of the real world, while
empathetic understanding of what others might be feeling and
thinking can never be relied upon. If we cannot understand each
other, all science collapses, since we need to be assured that our
colleagues are honest and rational observers. If we refuse to let
ourselves understand what animals are doing, if we never let
ourselves see things, as it were, with a gull's eye, or a
baboon's, how much are we likely to understand? Merely 'physical'
description ('And now the chimpanzee's hands have contacted an
empty oil can, and the can is rolling around the clearing, and the
chimpanzee is emitting sounds') may be an aid to acute
observation, but we have a more secure and useful understanding of
the event when we know that the chimpanzee is taking advantage of
human rubbish to impress his group.

In short: to say that a
man has lost his temper is no less an observational statement than
to say that he has lost his trousers. The evidence that either is
true is, in a sense, compatible with its being false: maybe the
man is acting, or maybe there is an optical illusion. Students may
devise interesting and useful theories about what is going on at a
neurophysiological or chemical level when a man has a tantrum. It
may even be that a knowledge of the laws of chemical change would
be enough to predict the motions through which his body will go
(if only we had enough time to do the calculation). But even such
a precise, physical theory would not prove that he was not
genuinely in a temper, nor would it prove that his being in a
temper was not a good explanation for his silence, his tense
muscles, his inability to open an envelope tidily, his expressed
belief that he has suffered a serious injustice and so on.

Scientists who profess to
believe that animals have no accessible inner life are rarely
consistent. If this were really their belief, they would consider
it a waste of time to try to anaesthetize an animal and would
certainly not draw conclusions about the psychology of human
beings from the motions of non-human beings. It is perhaps more
usual to think that animals do have feelings but that these
feelings do not involve any lengthy foresight, nor any concept of
the animal's place in the world and in society. This is in essence
the traditional view: not that animals are machines, but that they
are moved solely by immediate desire or pain. When a rat learns
not to run over an electrified floor, this is held to be a mere
conditioned reflex, not an intelligent assessment of the
situation: although the rat is repelled by the sight or smell of
the floor, it does not know why.

Although this view of
things is not wholly unbelievable when applied, say, to amoebae,
only those who still think that animals and human beings belong to
separate kingdoms can easily suppose that chimpanzees are more
like amoebae than they are like humans. If no animals except
ourselves ever really think (i.e. grasp what is going on and what
might be expected to follow, and respond not only to immediate
sensations but also to the imagined causes of those sensations),
how is it that human beings can think? Are we really alien or
supernatural creatures? It seems very much more likely that our
minds as well as our bodies resemble those of other animals -some
more than others. If hunting wasps do not really care for their
young, it is clear that primates do. Vervet monkeys, for example,
not only recognize their own cub's cry but recognize too whose
responsibility another cub may be (and look towards her). Adult
affection for the young may not be genuinely altruistic — young
hamadryas baboons must sometimes wish that their elders were not
quite as passionate in their pursuit. But the tests that show that
wasps do not have any interest in their young are ones that any
reasonable higher primate can pass. Monkeys who are reared by
human (but inhumane) psychologists in loveless environments, with
only imitation 'mothers' to cuddle, themselves make lousy mothers
and treat their offspring as they might a rat or an uncomfortable
growth. Normal mammals respond appropriately to their offspring's
call. Normal primates, in particular, recognize each other as
individuals and have clearly personal relations with their
fellows.

More generally, to say
that animals are 'only' responding to sensory cues, and not to any
more global grasp of the situation and their own role in it, is
not really a simpler explanation. If an animal is to respond
appropriately to a painful stimulus, it must be acting out an
innate, fixed action pattern. Even to learn from experience we
must already be acting, consciously or not, on the principle 'Do
what brought us satisfaction last time.' So there seems no final
reason why we should not admit the existence of other general
principles of action — dispositions to behave in one way rather
than another. Natural virtues arejust such dispositions. Moral
virtues, indeed, are dispositions that the agent has deliberately
acquired. A morally virtuous man has moulded himself to play some
part in society that he and others reckon valuable. Maybe
non-humans cannot train themselves. It does not follow that they
have no natural dispositions or that they have no grasp at all of
what goes on.

Even creatures whose
behaviour does at first seem to be merely a response to sensory
stimuli, in accordance with their natural disposition, may be more
complex than we thought. While woodlice need have no internal map
of their territory, worms perhaps do: at any rate, they
reconstruct their tunnel systems. Many animals, indeed, so far
from responding only to present stimuli, operate largely in terms
of a learned map of the area, which is why bats sometimes bump
into things, and laboratory mice can be induced to leap into empty
space with the conviction that there is a safe landing. This is
how self-consciousness arises, the capacity to locate oneself
within physical and social space (like the vervets), to know where
one is and whom one is dealing with and what is expected of one.
There is good reason to think that animals may be self-conscious
(in differing degrees) and that they can manipulate their
companions because they can form an idea of how those companions
will respond to their own actions. Witness the young chimpanzee
who walks away from a luxury he is too low in the hierarchy to
claim, knowing that the others will follow him: a little later he
returns secretively to get the treat. Witness also such 'problem
dogs' as manipulate their human owners into taking them for walks
or never leaving them alone.

The ability to identify
others as individuals and to recognize oneself as an object in
public space is perhaps connected with the sort of upbringing
animals receive. Creatures who produce a lot of young, of whom
only a few will survive, are unlikely to recognize or care for
them, or for anyone else, as individuals. Creatures who have few,
slowly maturing offspring can be expected to care for those
offspring. Since such care will require that they be able to
provide for them, they will not, in general, wish to do what
produces offspring unless they can count on ample provision -
unless, that is, they have a territory that will support them
(this is not to say that they necessarily think this policy out).
This is why birds form couples only when there is territorial
space available and may (in some species) be attached precisely to
the space rather than to their individual partners. In those
species the appearance of marital fidelity is an illusion: what
generally keeps the same birds together is that each has an
attachment to the territorial space. Those who are unable to make
good their claim upon such a territory do not form couples or
produce many offspring (except, of course, by 'cheating' -laying
eggs in an established couple's nest or seducing the female). In
other species the problem is dealt with by their ability to
recognize each other as individuals and their being bound to
marital fidelity. Barbary doves, for example, have been shown to
be monogamous, to be faithful to their first partners even at
unfamiliar nesting sites.

These patterns of
preference can be shown to make sense in terms of the needs of the
offspring and the nature of the animal's Umwelt (which is
to say, the environment as it is for an animal of that kind, with
those senses, capacities and preferences). Creatures that
characteristically produce a few, slowly maturing offspring will
not be indifferent to their offspring, or mate promiscuously
(which would waste energy), or be unable to distinguish
individuals of their own kind (unless they are strongly
territorial creatures, which feel about a piece of land as a
gander does about his goose).

This conclusion, that
mammals, like ourselves, will care for their children as
individuals, should not be exaggerated: though human beings have
fewer and more slowly maturing offspring than, for example, the
domestic cat, it does not follow that human beings cannot treat
their young with a comparable sternness. What does seem clear is
that some birds and mammals, at least, will be capable of forming
personal attachments and will be aware of their own position in
the world and in society. Without such attachments, without such
awareness, creatures of their kind would not survive long enough
to reproduce. Among the natural virtues of the higher mammals, at
any rate, will be those of parental care and faithfulness. We can
identify other virtuous dispositions that animals are likely to
display. Members of the same species are natural rivals for food
and territory and mates. But it does not follow that arrogant
individualists will be most successful in propagating their kind.
Creatures that always fight to the finish, that will never accept
defeat gracefully, that always kill or rob their rivals may win an
occasional battle, but they must spend so much time and energy on
forcing their will on others that any timid mutant which avoids
fights will be able to leave behind more offspring. Rather than
fighting directly for the goods they desire, animals are likely to
try out their strengths in a way that does not seriously damage
anyone. They do not usually use their most dangerous weapons
against their rivals, and losers accept their lot. They may even
(in disaster areas) let themselves starve to death while the
dominant few eat relatively well. This last phenomenon need not be
interpreted as a conscious suicide for the good of the tribe. It
is more likely to be a byproduct of the usually 'successful'
strategy of 'wait and see': better to wait for the dominant's
leavings and hope for a return match later on than risk a real
fight now. Conversely, it is often better for the dominants (those
successful in the contests that define the eating and mating
orders) to allow their subordinates lives of their own, sometimes
even to assist them, and not to press home their attacks lest
their victim turn upon them with the courage of despair.

The rules of 'war' were
among the first to be noticed by ethologists: witness the
'merciful wolf, who spares his defeated rival when that rival
rolls over and pretends to be a cub again. The assumption made by
Konrad Lorenz, one of the few remaining ethologists not to be
obsessed by the need to avoid anthropomorphism, that the wolf is
'inhibited' from killing his rival where a human victor would not
be is questionable on at least two counts. First, there is good
reason to think that human beings are very well able to kill each
other but usually do not. There is no clear evidence that their
record is much worse than the wolves'. Secondly, Lorenz gives no
reason to describe the case as one of'inhibition'. The wolf does
not (generally) kill — but that is evidence that he does not wish
to, and perhaps never did wish to. He wishes to establish his
superior rank, and that he does. We do not need to suppose that
the wolf wants to kill his rival but disapproves of his wanting to
do so and accordingly refrains. It is probably better to suppose
that any desire he has to kill simply evaporates when his defeated
rival resigns the contest. This sort of character is one that we
could sensibly commend, but it is not quite as much like human
moral virtue as Lorenz implies.

Other forms of animal
behaviour might be compared with moral virtue more convincingly.
It turns out that incest, or at any rate inbreeding, is much less
frequent than we would expect if animals behaved like Johnson's
savages. Female chimpanzees resist the advances of their brothers
and of any other too familiar males. When Lucy Temerlin, a
chimpanzee reared with humans and without experience of her
conspecifics, reached puberty she rejected the attentions of her
human foster-brother and foster-father while avidly pursuing any
other human males. Here the reports do suggest much more strongly
that Lucy experienced considerable conflict between her desire and
her aversion, a conflict that might plausibly be compared with
those of moralizing humanity. In this case an animal was inhibited
from doing what she perhaps half-wanted to do. In another,
reported by Jane van Lawick-Goodall from her observations of wild
chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park, most of the chimpanzees
ignored or bullied a companion who was partly paralysed. One
chimpanzee, though disliking the smell (and one can reasonably
assume) as much 'turned off by physical weakness and abnormality
as his companions (and most humans), did none the less continue to
treat the unfortunate and lonely ape as his old friend and
companion. The disposition to friendship was stronger in him than
the impulse to despise. This character too we would commend, even
if we doubted that the altruistic chimpanzee thought he was 'doing
his duty' - which some moralists have thought is the most
important motive for moral action. He preferred one way of acting
to another that he might have preferred.

Moral conscience, as we
understand it, reflects on the actions and emotions of others as
well as on one's own. To disapprove of oneself is also to
disapprove of others similarly placed. Indeed, there is some
reason to think that I come to know myself by knowing others who
know me; I come to disapprove of myself by knowing, and approving
of, others who might. So it is crucial to the existence of
conscience (and self-consciousness in general) that there be
social groups whose members attempt to regulate each other's
behaviour. To do this they must be able to re-identify each other;
they must have some grasp of past history; each must attend not
merely to what other creatures are doing to him or her but also to
what they are doing to each other. Such behaviour is not always
found where we might expect it. The cannibalistic pair of
chimpanzees discovered in the Gombe, for example, were
(understandably) feared and resented by their fellows, but there
has apparently been no attempt to ostracize or punish them. Other
breaches of tribal discipline perhaps earn greater disapproval,
notably (in some species) the attempt to dispossess an established
nesting couple (if that is anything more than the mobbing of a
supposed predator) or a failure of parental duty. If vervet
females can respond to their own cub's cry, and also look
(pointedly) at the mother of another crying cub, there is reason
to think that they are operating in such a social system and that
the roots of conscience are there.

By way of brief
conclusion: to be a 'good dog' is to have those virtues of
character that must be fairly widespread in a natural population
if creatures of that kind are to survive and reproduce. A good dog
is discriminating in her choice of mate, faithful to her cubs,
prepared to spare her rivals and to accept her place in the social
hierarchy of her group with good grace. Those animals that are of
a kind that can be expected to identify others as individuals, and
to reflect upon their own actions towards those individuals, may
show some signs of having preferred the paths of virtue to those
of easy gratification. Human animals alone, so far as we can see,
have taken the next step, that of trying to assess their own
sentiments in the light of reason. When they do, they are easily
persuaded that they must not live 'like animals', out of immediate
desire or fear. It would perhaps be better to remember that
animals themselves do not live 'like animals'. Good animals of any
kind (including the human) have some grasp of the physical and
social worlds in which they live and prefer the paths of
friendship and fidelity to those of war.